Ceva-ZTE Deal Hints Home-Grown ASIC Is Back

MADISON, Wis. — Ceva Inc. disclosed on Tuesday, August 13 that it has signed Chinese telecom equipment supplier ZTE as a new licensee for its Ceva-XC DSP core. ZTE's microelectronics division will be using Ceva's DSP to design LTE TDD/FDD multi-mode SoCs to power its upcoming base stations for the global market.

The announcement offers a glimpse at two forces currently sweeping the electronics industry: a growing appetite among first-tier OEMs to develop their own ASICs to power their systems, as opposed to buying third-party ASSPs; and the growing traction for TD-LTE in China.

Big shift
Eran Briman, Ceva's vice president of marketing, in a phone interview with EET Times, said, "OEMs -- whether in the consumer electronics or infrastructure market -- increasingly want to be in the driver's seat by licensing a DSP core and designing their own SoCs."

Even if they lack resources to design chips on their own, he explained, "System vendors are getting highly involved in chip architecture definitions, they license cores and hand them off to ASIC suppliers to develop ASICs they want to use."

Hang on. You mean ASICs have risen from the dead?

It's well known that two leading smartphone vendors are designing their own apps processors to drive and differentiate their own handsets. The same goes for base station equipment vendors, said Briman. As system vendors' investment in software development for base stations continues to grow, they want a platform that's "more flexible and scalable," he added. "That's the big shift we're seeing now," he said.

So, who's at risk of getting the short shrift from system vendors like ZTE?

That would be companies such as Texas Instruments or Freescale Semiconductor who offer ASSPs for base stations, Briman said.

Typically, those companies offer solutions "based on a general purpose DSP augmented by a lot of hardware around it," he said. But when base station vendors need to design true multi-mode systems armed with lots of complex software, they want to invest in a platform whose destiny they can control, Briman explained. Such software they are developing range from multi-mode basebands to wireless backhaul and Wi-Fi offloading.

In the case of ZTE, the Chinese telecom equipment supplier has its own chip division -- complete with ASIC design capabilities, said Briman, just like the world's leading telecom equipment behemoth Huawei also has its own affiliate, HiSilicon, to design their own silicon. For its own LTE TDD/FDD base station, ZTE is likely to "design a multi-core solution with a cluster of DSPs, with ARM core attached to it to handle upper layers," Briman observed.

Maybe ZTE wants to better protect their design from a copycat. If they used a standard SRAM-based FPGA and a standard DSP it would be easy for someone to copy or reverse engineer their design. With their own ASIC they can better protect their design from possible theft.

Differentiaion is definitely one reason OEMs design their own ASICs, but there are many more: 1.) Design control 2.) Long term supply stability 3.) Price. 4.) Power 5.) Cost 6.) Performance 7.) Density 8.) IP Protection 9.) Time to market

There has been a lot of hype in the last N years proclaiming the "death of the asic", and yet there are still plenty of monster ASICs being built by tier-one vendors.(especially in the comms field) Sure, ASICs are now more expensive to build ($5-10M) but they still make sense if they can be used to gain or keep revenue shares in end equipment markets that are in the $B's.

It used to be that the sheer complexity of the design process and the toolchain support made this kind of effort a bad idea, but I'm not so sure that is true anymore. We are using an Atmel SoC in one design, but we used buildroot to configure and build a customized OS and cross-compiler in a very short period of time rather than using the toolset that Atmel provides. That way we get to decide exactly how fast we want to integrate new changes. I can see moving from that to licensing the ARM core and custom-tailoring the peripheral interfaces ourselves. Unfortunately, I can also see companies getting in deep trouble trying to do that with engineers that are not up to the task.

@Larry, that's fascinating...so the tools available today are definitely changing the landscape, you say.

But as you also pointed out, it still takes a team of talented designers to develop a home-grown SoC, which is probably no easy feat.

One question. Ceva executive was telling me that if you don't have a in-house SoC design capability, you could still ask an ASIC vendor to build your SoC for you. I wonder which ASIC companies are profiting from such a trend...

so you are saying the death of ASIC hsa been greatly exaggerated. I guess I am one of those as guilty as charged.

That said, though, I'd have to wonder that this trend for home-grown SoCs must be limited to tier-one OEMs. Unless you have a clear ROI in mind, it's still a risky proposition. No? I mean, to do it inhouse.

It's not a slam-dunk for the tier one guys either. I used to work for one of the major defense contractors, and one of their projects was at one point 2 years behind schedule because they couldn't get an ASIC design to work. The problem essentially was that they had a bad system design (VME really doesn't work very well when you extend it 50 feet or so... Who'd have thunk it?). Just because you are a big company doesn't mean that you do all things well.

Well, one example of ASIC being design by a large Chinesse telco doesn't mean much, they just probably want to lower the unit cost...large ASICs are extermely complex to design properly...it takes time (1-2 YEARS, sometimes longer) and money (at least $5M, sometimes $50M)...you need a billion dollar market to justofy the cost...sure, there will be ASICs always designed for these large socket opps but the number of ASIC tape-outs has, is and will be diminishing...sad reality for ASIC design guys (myself included ;-)

You have a point there. But Ceva might disagree with your statement about "one large Chinese telecom OEM doing ASIC doesn't mean much."
Ceva claims the number of system OEMs wanting to license cores ARE increasing in recent months. That, in their eyes, is a "big change" unfolding in the industry at the moment.